Errors of justice

Justice it wasn't, but the federal court of appeals in New Orleans last week decided it could not "abdicate" its "duty to faithfully apply" the law and threw out James Ford Seale's three life sentences.

That Seale committed two horrendous racist murders in Mississippi's darkest days cannot be doubted. He was a Klansman in 1964, when black teenagers Henry Dee and Charles Moore were kidnapped, brutalized, weighted down and left to drown.

The appeals court evidently acquitted Seale with a heavy heart, noting that "we are mindful of the seriousness of the crimes." But the Justice Department's errors could not be overlooked.

When the remains of Dee and Moore were fished out of a Mississippi River backwater a couple of months after their disappearance, state cops arrested Seale and his cousin Charles Marcus Edwards.

Edwards confessed to abducting Dee and Moore and whipping them brutally in a remote corner of the Homochitto National Forest, but claimed they were alive when he left.

Other witnesses refused to testify, fearing reprisal -- Seale's father was Franklin County's Grand Cyclops at the time -- and the Mississippi criminal justice system in any case didn't need much excuse to let white supremacists off the hook in those days. The DA declined to prosecute, and Seale suffered no further inconvenience until the feds' renewed interest in the atrocities of Jim Crow led them to indict him in January of last year.

Then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference to announce that Seale had been indicted on two counts of "kidnapping resulting in death" and one count of conspiracy. Asked why the charge was not murder, Gonzales said that the government had brought only those charges it was confident could be proven.

But not to worry. Each count carried a maximum sentence of life in prison and there was "no statute of limitations for these crimes, " Gonzales explained.

The court of appeals had other ideas.

When Seale went on trial, Edwards was on hand to testify for the prosecution under a grant of immunity. He recalled that Seale had held a sawn-off shotgun on Dee and Moore while they were whipped for about half an hour in the forest.

Seale later told him that they were later taken to Parker's Landing on Davis Island and rolled into the river with duct tape over their mouths and heavy metal objects attached to their bodies, Edwards testified.

Seale's attorneys argued that the government was not entitled to file charges so many years after the event, but the judge overruled them.

Edwards subsequently became a pariah in Franklin County, where half the population thought he had gotten away with murder and the other half damned him as a snitch. He was still much better off than Seale, who was assigned to the federal prison in Terre Haute and was never expected to taste freedom again.

Now he soon will, because the court of appeals agreed that the statute of limitations barred the government from instituting a prosecution. Federal law gives prosecutors a five-year deadline except in capital cases, where they have unlimited time. Kidnapping does not carry the death penalty, so the government ran out of time in Seale's case decades ago.

That sounds like a no-brainer, but the trial judge ruled the clock had not run out because kidnapping was a capital offense when Seale committed his crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled that the death penalty for kidnapping was unconstitutional in 1968, and four years later Congress amended the statute accordingly -- with, the appeals court ruled, retroactive effect.

Still, the case has not been an entire waste of time. Seale may not have gotten his deserts, but at least he spent some time behind bars. We'll take what we can get, and this is one time when a wrongful conviction is welcome.

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James Gill is a staff writer. He can be reached at 504.826.3318 or at jgill@timespicayune.com.